BULGARIA: Iron Curtain lifted slowly on country brimming with European allure

"We must inform the police about you," said the desk clerk at my hotel.

For a moment I was gripped with long-dormant, behind-the-Iron-Curtain paranoia. Then I noticed the pleasant young woman was smiling and rolling her eyes.

"It's a stupid rule left over from the old days," she said as she jotted down information from my passport. "Nobody even reads these. We got rid of the socialists, but it's not so easy to get rid of the bureaucracy."

I had come to Bulgaria because there's a growing consensus among travel aficionados that the Balkan nation is poised to become the next big thing in European tourism, this year's Croatia. My verdict: It's still a little ways off -- maybe the next big thing after the next big thing. For now, it's a compellingly fascinating, unspoiled, off-the-tourist-grid destination for slightly adventurous travelers.

Admittedly, Bulgaria, formerly one of the Soviet Union's more reliable allies, hasn't been as quick as Slovenia or the Czech Republic to slough off its grim and stodgy Eastern Bloc reputation. To many in the West, it still brings to mind poisoned umbrellas, papal assassination conspiracies and female Olympic weightlifters who looked like Ernest Borgnine in drag. But that image, I discovered, is rather outdated -- sometimes spectacularly so.

Roughly the size of Ohio, the country is blessed with an abundance of the things that call us to Europe. During my week there I gazed at haunting medieval frescoes in thousand-year-old churches, sipped surprisingly good wines in sidewalk cafes, poked around well-preserved Roman ruins and passed through rural villages where horse-drawn carts still trundle down cobbled lanes. There was so much to see that I never made it to the sun-baked beaches of Bulgaria's Black Sea coast (which, I understand, have been largely colonized by Brits and Germans on package holidays).

In Plovdiv, it took only a few minutes in a sidewalk cafe to puncture one hoary old stereotype. On the busy pedestrian boulevard that runs north from Stefan Stambolov Square, the young women of Bulgaria's second-largest city, who all seem to look like models, doll themselves up in skin-tight outfits that reveal a provocative amount of flesh and strut up and down the street as if it were a fashion-show runway. The boulevard is officially known as Knyaz Aleksandar, but everyone calls it "Vanity Street." So much for Ernest Borgnine in drag. (And what did the men look like? Hard to say. They were all sitting in the cafes watching the show.)

Like its neighbors, Bulgaria continues to turn westward. It's already a member of NATO, hopes to join the European Union next year and eventually plans to adopt the euro. That's likely to give the sluggish economy a jolt, but at present Bulgaria is that rarest and most precious of things -- a corner of Europe where the dollar still swaggers.

I'd just arrived from London, where every purchase -- every $7 pint in a pub, every $8 Underground ticket -- brought gasps of astonishment. But never have I gone so rapidly from pauper to prince. For the price of a windowless monk's cell in London, I got an enormous suite in Plovdiv decorated in elegant Bulgarian Revival style. For what I paid to go two stops on the London Underground, I got a first-class seat on a train ride halfway across Bulgaria. A steak and fries lunch in a fashionable cafe cost the equivalent of $3.50; a bottle of local Cabernet Sauvignon in a white-tablecloth restaurant was $6; two big scoops of Bulgarian gelato (not quite as good as Italian, but then what is?) cost 80 cents. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to open a European menu or examine a hotel bill without cringing. (Note: Euros are frequently accepted at hotels, but the official currency is the lev, about 1.5 to the dollar.)

I was startled to learn that, even at these agreeably low prices, I was paying much more than a Bulgarian. At hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions, there's still a dual price system, with foreigners being charged three or four times the local price. (If this rankles, remember that white-collar workers in Bulgaria earn only about $200 a month. And take another look at those "inflated" prices you're paying. )

Hits and misses

Almost immediately I discovered the challenge of traveling independently in Bulgaria. In Sofia's railway station, a gloomy, cavernous hall left over from the Communist days, everything -- everything -- was written in the Cyrillic alphabet. When I finally found the information window, the woman behind it spoke no English and cut short my pathetic attempts at Bulgarian with a dismissive wave. Eventually I chanced upon the right ticket window, and by circling phrases in the back of my Lonely Planet guide, I was able to buy my ticket and find my way to the right platform.

Dining was only a little easier. For some reason, none of the translations in my guidebook matched anything I found on menus. But a few waitresses spoke enough English to help me, and one restaurant had a Denny's-style menu with helpful pictures of the dishes. Mostly, though, I just resorted to the old trick of pointing at what I wanted on the plates of neighboring diners. It worked well enough, with one memorable exception -- I think it was a sauteed spleen -- that the waitress cheerfully sent back to the kitchen.

Sightseeing was no trouble. A 10-minute walk from Plovdiv's Vanity Street, I found another outdoor cafe with a view more to my wife's approval: It sits on the top row of a remarkably intact, 6,000-seat Roman amphitheater. The columned facade behind the stage, the scaenae frons, is mostly standing, with the help of some light-handed restoration work. Other than some workers setting up the venue for a classical music concert, I had the place to myself. So I stood on the stage and tested the excellent acoustics with my best "Friends, Romans, countrymen ..." soliloquy.

There's an amazing reason why the amphitheater is so well preserved: Nobody knew it was there for 1,500 years. Built in A.D. 117, the amphitheater was sacked by Attila the Hun in the fifth century, then covered in dirt and completely forgotten until a freak landslide exposed it in 1972.

In Plovdiv you can't swing a cattus without hitting some Roman ruins. The toppled columns of the Forum stood just outside my hotel window. In a big hole at the upper end of Vanity Street, beneath a bronze statue of Macedonian king Phillip II -- who fathered both the city and Alexander the Great -- is the exposed section of an enormous Roman stadium with, inexplicably, a glassed-in Internet cafe in the center.

Mostly I spent my days ambling along the cobblestone lanes of Plovdiv's Old Town, passing beneath timbered houses with upper stories that leaned out over both sides of the street, almost meeting in the middle. I stopped to listen to a grizzled old organ grinder -- a living ghost from another age -- and poked around the hilltop ruins of Nebet Tepe, a 7,000-year-old Thracian village redeveloped by the Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgars and Turks. In Western Europe I'd have to share these sites with milling hordes following their tour guides, but here I had them nearly to myself.

More eye candy

Five hours away by train, Veliko Tarnovo, the ancient capital of Bulgaria, is achingly picturesque, with (as my guidebook put it) perhaps the most spectacular and romantic setting in Eastern Europe.

At the Hotel Gurko, the manager led me through the establishment's mehana -- a traditional wood-paneled tavern -- and up four flights of stairs to my top-floor room. (Bulgarian hotels don't seem to have been let in on the invention of the elevator.) With a flourish he threw open the door to the balcony, and when I stepped outside, I gasped.

Above a horseshoe bend in the meandering gorge of the Yantra River, the colorful, tile-roofed houses of the city's medieval quarter spilled down steep cliffs to the river bank, with the Romanesque facade of the State Art Museum shining on the opposite bank. Rarely have I had such an enchanting view from a hotel balcony -- certainly never from a room that cost only $48.

In backpacker circles, Veliko Tarnovo is starting to get a "next Prague" buzz. There's not much of a cafe scene, and the one bookstore I came across was devoid of customers, but Stefan Stambolov Street -- every town seems to have a thoroughfare named after the man called "the Bulgarian Bismarck" -- was lined with clubs with such names as "Mosquito" and "Scream Club" pumping throbbing euro-disco music out into the night.

At the far end of town, the imposing remains of the Tsarevets Fortress cover an entire hilltop above another horseshoe bend in the river. The home of 22 successive kings during the Second Bulgarian Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries, it once held 400 houses, 18 churches and monasteries and a 48,000-square-foot palace that included a throne measuring 30 by 100 feet. At least that's what my guidebook said. None of the signs was in English, and a lot of what was left was foundations and toppled stone walls.

There were other sights to see, but I kept returning to my balcony to watch the dancing cloud shadows and the golden, late-afternoon light creeping down the sides of the gorge. It was, hands down, the best show in town.

Not ready for prime time

From time to time I was reminded that Bulgaria's infrastructure is still playing catch-up. On my second morning in Veliko Tarnovo, I was standing in the shower, all sudsed up, when the faucet sputtered, coughed and went dry. The woman at the front desk said a water pressure problem was affecting the upper floors of buildings all over town, and I got the impression this wasn't the first time.

The next day I was congratulating myself on paying only $7.50 for a first-class seat on a five-hour train ride when I discovered I was going only 150 miles -- a distance a French TGV train can cover in under an hour.

In Sofia, the capital, only a couple of blocks separate Bulgaria's socialist past from its capitalist present. On Maria Luisa street, the landmark five-story TSUM department store is now a glitzy, high-end mall filled with all the usual labels: Lancôme, Givenchy, Dior, Bulgari (an Italian brand, incidentally), Timberland and Nautica. Bill Bryson, who visited in 1973, described entire families staring agog at Bulgaria's latest technological marvels -- black-and-white televisions with 4-inch screens. Now the shelves are filled with 60-inch Sony plasma-screen TVs. Fashionably dressed men and women in their 20s and early 30s gabbed on mobile phones as they rode the escalators. In the entire mall, I'm pretty sure I didn't see anyone older than 35.

Two blocks away, the Zhenski Pazar -- "the ladies' market" -- covers several blocks, with rattling old streetcars passing by. Walking there from TSUM feels like crossing Checkpoint Charlie in Cold War-era Berlin: On the other side it was still 1970, with old men in ill-fitting brown suits and women in head scarves. The concrete buildings lining the street were dark and dreary. But the produce and meat for sale in the stalls was fresh and abundant, and, judging by the bulging plastic bags they toted, these retired socialists could afford plenty of it. No doubt the transition to a market economy has been wrenching for many Bulgarians, but it's perhaps not so bad as some make it out to be.

Orthodox icon

I saved for last Bulgaria's most revered and iconic site: the Rila Monastery in the craggy mountains above Sofia. Its history dates back to 927, when a Bulgarian Orthodox saint named Ivan Rilski (a.k.a. St. John of Rila) chose a hermit's life inside a dank cave. His students built a complex nearby that eventually grew -- with several restarts and makeovers -- into the present fortress-like monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site and Bulgaria's most-visited tourist attraction.

I hired a private, English-speaking guide and a driver and got there early, before the crush of tour buses arrived.

The four-story cloistered walls that surround a granite-slab courtyard hold 300 monks' quarters (and a kitchen to feed pilgrims, with a cauldron large enough to hold an entire cow). In the courtyard stands the striped, triple-domed Church of the Nativity. Gregory Dicum aptly described it as looking like "ripe figs atop a fanciful mille-feuille." Its outer arcades are covered with spooky murals depicting demons torturing various naked wrongdoers, mostly dishonest shopkeepers and adulterous women.

Inside the church, the scent of frankincense filled the air and candlelight flickered on gilded icons and paintings of gaunt and haunting Orthodox saints. Somewhere in there, I was told, are the mummified remains of St. John. But I never saw them.

By the time I left, a convoy of buses was filling the parking lot and noisy throngs of tourists were assembling around the upraised umbrellas of tour guides. I was thankful I'd been able to steal a march on everyone else and enjoy the monastery -- as I did all of Bulgaria -- before the crowds showed up.

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IF YOU GO
Getting there

There are no direct flights from San Francisco to Bulgaria. United and Lufthansa fly from SFO to Sofia, connecting through Frankfurt. British Airways connects through Heathrow, but requires an overnight stay in London.

Getting around

Bulgaria has a good rail network, with fares that are eye-openingly cheap. Upgrading to first class usually costs less than a dollar. Trains are in fairly good condition and usually depart on time, although they don't always arrive punctually. And they tend to be slow. Buses are faster and about the same price, but less comfortable and scenic.

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